Detritus in the Jordan

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
BAPTISM OF CHRIST
(January 10^th) 2016

 

Readings:

Isaiah 43: 1-7

Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

 

As the early Christians set about proclaiming what theologians tend to call the Christ event – that is the entire birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus – they were beset with many problems. One of those, apparently a well-circulated oral tradition, was the Baptism of Jesus. Why was one soon to be described as sinless baptised in a rite that John the Baptiser described as being “for the forgiveness of sins”? The Christians could not wriggle out of the dilemma: it was a well-known fact of Jesus’ life.

The Christians were determined to use the Hebrew scriptures as proof that their crucified Saviour,  powerfully known to them in worship and fellowship, was also known to them to in the Hebrew scriptures. As they journeyed through the Hebrew texts of faith they found reference after reference that ignited their sparks of faith and joy. Some of them may seem a little tenuous to a contemporary reader, but they were not to our forebears.

So when they found an Isaian reference to a saviour figure who would journey with believers through waters and fires and flames they had no difficulty in seeing the life of Jesus foreshadowed. It resonated with their experience of the presence of the risen Christ as they grew in faith. It resonated with their stories of Jesus’ own baptism by John. It resonated with their sense that every Christian life is a journey through self-surrender and death to resurrection and eternity. The early Christians glimpsed eternity again and again in their worship and fellowship and study, and no one was going to take it away from them. The Jesus they knew had passed through the waters of the Jordan and the waters of death.

Baptism wasn’t a new thing when John used it, nor was it unique to Judaism. In many religions of the Middle East (and elsewhere) water, preferably but not necessarily running, was a powerful symbol of birth, cleansing and death, not necessarily in that order. John adopted it, but gave it emphasis on cleansing. He linked the rite with God’s apocalyptic wrath, with a powerful critique of corrupt leadership, and with an energy that would soon be a hallmark not only of his ministry but that of his kinsman and protégé Jesus.

Jesus himself saw the power of the symbol and handed it on to his followers. In the hands of the Jesus-followers, not least Paul, it became a symbol of death and resurrection, and, because Jesus himself had undergone the rite, of baptizands’ participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Whether Paul was the first to see it that way we cannot tell, but his teachings gave that belief powerful impetus, and it has stayed central to Christian beliefs ever since. It became associated, too, with the indwelling of the Spirit, as reflected in the tellings of the story of the baptism of Jesus himself.

The Christians saw clearly that the Baptism of Jesus was no parenthesis, but a central event of cosmic significance in the saving life lived by Jesus. Paul’s language of grafting on, probably borrowed from Jesus in any case, became a powerful tool by which to understand the event. The Incarnation, the “descent” of God into human form, was the grafting of the Jesus-event onto the human story. The Creator, fully yet impossibly present in the Man of Nazareth, enters into the confinement and restriction of human experience: “from heaven you came, helpless babe.” Human experience entered into the heart of Godhead. But the baptism was something else, something more specific still. The experience of human sinfulness, the sense of a need for restoration and reconciliation with the Creator, became a part of the experience of being God. Later the two dimensions, being human and being fallen, would culminate in the utter aloneness of the experience of dereliction and death, when God would cry out in the psalmist’s pain-filled scream “my God my God, why have you forsaken me?” God was grafted on to all human experience, even the experience of God-forsakenness. All that experience was then caught up in the unrepeatable, “unsurrenderable” and incomprehensible event of the Resurrection.

 The Baptism of Christ then was about God grafting divine being onto humanity – God entering into and transforming both the existence and the faith-life of God’s people. But it was also about sin. It was about God the logically sinless entering into the murk and degradation of sinfulness. Icons of the Baptism of Christ will often depict him standing in the shallow waters of the Jordan surrounded by the detritus of human existence – today we might depict him standing amidst the syringes and lifejackets and dumped  tyres and batteries and sexual apparatus of post-modernity’s webs of sin. It is about entering into the corporate sin of injustice and ecological exploitation, but it is also about the personal sin by which I dehumanise those after whom I might lust, or on whom I might prey, or who’s portion of the world’s resources I might nonchalantly discard. It is about my wearing of sweatshop-manufactured clothing, my consumption of palm-oil exploiting spreads, my participation in the sin that degrades human bodies whether I do personally or just participate in a world that does so. It is about my sin and our sin, and our sin as a handful of people and our sin as all humanity. It is into that degradation that Jesus steps in the Jordan.

But that is not the end of the Baptism-story any more than Good Friday’s cry of dereliction is the end of the Incarnation-story. Jesus emerges from the detritus-ridden waters of the metaphysical Jordan and from the mortality-ridden waters of the “deep waters of death.” Jesus rises – cleansed for us, so that we too might rise, cleansed. Neither greenhouse gasses nor my own propensity for sin is the end of the story: God’s restoration of humanity and of me and of you is the foreshadowed and yet to come never-end, the endless story of God’s love. It is a personal story of our rebirth, and a cosmic story of the new heavens and the new earth yet to be seen, long to be longed for, never to be surrendered. It is the story that my life transcends death, and the story that all life and all love transcends death, even the death of planet Earth.

It is the story that you and I are called to proclaim with our every attitude, our every action, our every fibre: it is the story that we must proclaim with words if necessary but with actions inescapably if we are to be a resurrection people. It is the story that must be our story this year, if we are not to be left behind on the bottom of a murky Jordan River.

Fortunately, though, there is a Spirit hovering above the waters, and by the sid of that Spirit, the invasion of that Spirit, we too may participate in the emergence of Jesus from the detritus of Jordan and Death alike.

 

 

TLBWY

 

The logic of Matthew's Magi

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
EPIPHANY
(January 3rd) 2016

Readings:
Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

In “The Journey of the Magi,” the famous poem of T.S. Eliot, the young anglo-catholic poet deliberately fuses the stories of Christmas and Easter, as one of the wise men recalls a journey he made long before. The journey was made with two companions, but the details are now slipping into a fog of dementia: “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” the old man muses. In his dementia he radiates wisdom: there was a birth and a death, and Eliot and the gospel-writer Matthew alike want us to know they are inseparable in meaning.

The human brain cannot fathom God unaided, but nor are those who seek truth expected to place otherwise intelligent brains in neutral. Human intellect by itself won’t lead a punter to Jesus, but as C.S. Lewis or more recently Terry Eagleton have reminded us, if an intelligent human genuinely seeks to know the God of Jesus Christ they may well find what they are looking for.

Matthew wants to create a symbolic story, placing the birth of Jesus at the collision point of human need and political corruption. He tells his tale to remind proclaimers of God that intelligence and wisdom, that of the wise sages, are servants of meaning. The wise, he suggests, still seek Jesus.

For Matthew Jesus’ birthplace and related happenings take on symbolic and theological meaning. We still engage in this kind of enriched story-telling: famous Gallipoli stories of Simpson’s donkey in Australia or Henderson’s in New Zealand generate an inspirational awareness of bravery far more important than the details of the events. Stories about the Chappells’ under-arm bowl in 1981, or Bob Deans’ non-try of 1905, or more significantly of Tārore’s martyrdom in the 1830s, stories from vastly different contexts, generate meaning and bonding for the tellers and listeners. Matthew knew this trade well: Jesus may or may not have been born in Bethlehem, wise men may or may not have journeyed to adore him, a star may or may not have shone to guide them, but Matthew and his successors knew well that these are useful descriptions of the remarkable implications of the birth of the Saviour.

These stories are not nonsense: they tell of Jesus’ unique place in the purposes (and even being) of God. That belief was supported by the experiences worshippers had of the presence of Jesus in their midst, conquering injustice and fear and doubt, making, as Annie Lennox put it, “the bad things go away.” Armed with that knowledge believers could face anything life or the Roman Empire threw at them.

What was nonsense was to dismiss the deep truth embedded in the stories, to sneer at them, to stand over them in judgement so that those who wanted to encounter the life- and death-transforming Christ were unable to take that life-transforming leap to encounter his healing, saving goodness. Seekers for meaning, the genuinely wise, do not “diss” narratives that convey truth. Matthew knew that. He knew that his wise men stood as representation of every human being who has set out to discover meaning to life, every wise person who has sought to proclaim justice amidst injustice, hope amidst hopelessness, God in the midst of a terrifyingly and logically empty universe.

Matthew had little time for human logic: Herod, in his sneering schemes, becomes the symbol of the kind of logic that dismantles human hope, that mocks simple faith, that attempts, as Paul put it, to tear down rather than build up the vulnerable and vulnerable-in-faith. Matthew’s listeners did not necessarily need to believe in strange eastern sages, but they did believe that in the simple things of Jesus they had discovered wisdom greater than the corruption and evil and injustice or the Roman Empire and of compromised religion, greater even than the precariousness of life in the first century. In Jesus they had found life – and life greater even than death.

So-called “progressive” Christians will often cringe at the bigoted pronouncements made in the name of the Jesus of Americanised Christianity, and rightly so. I suspect we have little difficulty in finding more wisdom in the toenails of Malala Yousafzai or Aung San Suu Kyi than in proponents of religious bigotry who claim to be followers of Christ, more bravery in the struggles of an Anousheh Ansari or her protégé Sepideh Hooshyar than the conceit of a Creflo Dollar or a Benny Hinn. Nevertheless we need to critique aspects of our own faith and practice, too.  Do we allow a place for those who hear God speaking to them, to those who have visions, to those whose understanding of the scriptures is uninformed by so-called “higher criticism”? Do we scorn those whose worship is so full of the emotional joy of knowing Jesus that without inhibition they raise their hands or dance or clap at his presence? Do we look askance at the oddballs in our society, the eccentric and befuddled, the damaged and bewildered who might equally be bearers of gold and incense and myrrh to the feet of Jesus?

Herod felt that he was smarter than the gauche travellers from the East. He sought to outwit them, and failed. Matthew will go on to tell a story of the infant whose appointment by God thwarts the machinations of the smart and the mighty, who sidesteps the tyrannies of the Roman Empire and the bigotries of oppressive religion. Herod represents in Matthew’s hands a cynical merger of Roman oppression and religious compromise. We want to be on the side of a story that sidesteps Herod, but in order to be so we need to look for all that is Herodian in us.

Where do we belong in this story? We need to make sure that we still have a child’s heart that can look on the baby Jesus with awe and delight, and place gifts at his feet. We must ensure that we can still dance with angels, mesmerized by the mystery of the Creator of the universe lying in a manger. We need to hear, too, the cry of baby Jesus, and know that this is, as Matthew will go on to tell us and Justin Welby has reminded us, the cry of every child who will be thrown out in the lottery of world politics and in the refugee’s search for safety from oppression and war.

Can we still weep tears of consternation and joy with Mary, as she finds the vulnerability and holiness and righteousness of the Way of Jesus bewildering, frightening, yet unavoidable? Can we muddle birth and death in our minds so that the whole of Jesus’ birth and teachings and death and resurrection and future coming become a wonderful fertile ground of laughter and joy and strength in times of weakness? Can we so throw away propriety (for Herod was a very proper man) that we instinctively welcome and embrace all who would cautiously or gauchely slip a toe in the door in the search for truth?

The story becomes muddled, like that of Eliot’s old traveller: the wise men enter Jesus’ stable. Yet at the same time Jesus enters the mysterious and searching, welcoming and embracing stable of their hearts and minds. Perhaps this was what Phillips Brooks was saying when he cried out to the infant Jesus “cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.”

TLBWY

Dancing in a fecund womb

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
FIRST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
(December 27^th) 2015

 

Readings:

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

 

Samuel’s story originates in the pain-filled piety of a young woman teased by a rival. In translation the name of the two wives of Elkanah, Samuel’s father, are “Fertile” and “Attractive.” Ms Attractive, Hannah, eventually experiences the delayed and perhaps miraculous conception after long enduring the taunts of her fertile co-wife. She is transformed from barrenness to the tender joy of birthing prophet Samuel. There is salvation here: the taunted if attractive woman Hannah had in her culture no reason to live but the bearing of children. God invades her life with blessing, and she bears the son by which she, in her culture, is redeemed.

Samuel grew up saturated in the dance of the faith that led his mother to cry out in pain for the only salvation she could know: a son. . The story of Samuel’s life is answer to Hannah’s faith that “the Lord raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” Hannah dedicated him to the service of God. She gave back to God what God had given her. For us, as we emerge from the complex web of a virally capitalist Christmas there is a message about receiving much, even much that is unnecessary, and giving much out in response.

Giving back to God is not necessarily or even often a pathway to the cosy happiness that is the stuff of coffee or chocolate ads on the giggle box. It is a journey into the inexpressible joys – and occasional frustrating challenges – of living and breathing in the context of God’s eternities, the infinities of divine love. It is an invitation to participate in a story that is both personal and cosmic, anchored in time and yet endless and far beyond time, far beyond finitude, and far beyond our comprehension.

We, as the author of Colossians sternly charges us, are called to enact that story in our lives. Colossians  is a commission to love, to exemplary standards, even beyond-possible standards of love. It is that because that is what we have received in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. That is what we have celebrated liturgically these past few days: the coming of the eternity-transforming child into our world and our lives. As we were celebrating that we were celebrating the fact that our lives and the lives of those we love are not restricted to mere human experience but are caught up into the impossible eternities and eternal possibilities of God. The author of Colossians challenges us to be a people of exemplary love because that is what will attract others to the Way of the Cross, the inviting life and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus.

Colossians challenges us to reach beyond vacuous promises of coffee and chocolate ads to a far deeper level of love that will reach through barren heartache and brokenness and then reach out to touch and transform the lives of others. Hannah, trapped in the bitterness of her rival’s taunts, cries in prayer to God. She receives the child Samuel as an answer to that prayer, but the cycle does not end there: she creates of Samuel a life so Godwardly focussed that he repeats the cycle. He having been saturated in the enormity of God’s love and justice turns and becomes himself a conduit of God’s love and justice.

And so the story is perpetuated. We may not see our biological children dancing in the aisles of faith – though some do – but we may still reach out so much, so warmly to the community around us that those we embrace with our welcome and our worship and our hospitality and our justice are touched and embraced by the eternities of divine love. Jesus and Samuel are saturated in love. Our task is to generate a Christ-family so saturated and saturating in love that we act as a conduit to the eternities of God.

How?

As the biblical authors knew well, the answers are not a kind of six-steps to conversion or join-the-dots to salvation or paint-by-numbers to gain eternity, nor are they the denial of needs for conversion or salvation or eternity. Nor are they bickering and backstabbing and complacent laisses-faire or indulgent narcissism and self-righteousness. Too easily we slip into senses of our own importance or greatness or even adequacy, when the witness of Samuel, of Jesus, of Paul and of others is that we are, except in the eyes of God and through the prism of Jesus, unimportant, small, and thoroughly unrighteous. Both Testaments are endlessly supplied with the texts and sayings of the prophets who addressed a self-satisfied people of God. Indeed, when you find Paul and his supporters encouraging his correspondents to “clothe themselves with love” it is almost always precisely because that is conspicuously what they are not doing. These are, as Phylis Tribble reminded us, texts of terror, and only after we embrace that stern critique can they become for us “comfortable words” of encouragement.

Quite simply, we are called to be a community of love. We become that by over and again exposing ourselves to the stern glare of a Creator-Redeemer God who reminds us that we are, in reality, the in-hospitable ones. We are the ones who turn away the desperate Mary, who laugh at the barren Hannah, and who crucify the love-dancing Jesus. We become a community of love, however imperfect and struggling, by over and again losing ourselves in the ecstasy of worship, seizure by the God of awe and majesty and might, an ecstasy of seizure like that of the psalm we recited; by losing narcissistic selfhood in the knowledge that we need Jesus; by losing self-assuredness in the knowledge that it is Jesus who touches and transforms our darkest fears and the sometimes even abhorrent inner recesses of our being, those darknesses that we barely admit to owning. We become a community of love by dancing ecstatically, like the psalmist, dancing with the Christ who picks us out of the gutters of indecency and not-good-enough-ness, then challenges us to invite others to our dance. That same Jesus holds us in warm, life-changing, self-transcending grace: he tells us to surrender the dark places, as well as the judgemental places, the critical places, the sclerotic, hardened places of our lives. He challenges us to become the embodiment of love that only he can make us.

As a cathedral people we are called to be transformed from Hannah the attractive but barren to Hannah the fecund, the fertile. Christ, you know it ain’t easy, sang John Lennon. This can become for us not a profanity, but a prayer, as we again ask Jesus to invade the barren and inhospitable chambers of our hearts and individually and collectively become a place of welcome to the seeking and embrace to the lonely. By the Spirit of Christ we can be enabled to open our hearts and our church to be a place where love is incubated in ridiculous, excessive, unrestricted generosity. That risky, mad generosity is the generosity of spirits invaded by the child who so puzzled Mary, the pondering mother. That mad, risky, generosity is the Way of the Cross to which we are called.

TLBWY

 

Welcoming the illogical Christ

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 20^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Micah 5:2-5a

Psalm 80:1-7
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55
 

Every narrator since before Homer created his or her tale to take their audience to a particular perspective or experience. Whether the writer’s task be “mere” entertainment or a much deeper level of instruction, they seek to take us into a new perspective on what Douglas Adams called “life, the universe, and everything.” The gospel authors were no exception. They took thirty or forty years’ worth of remarkable, credible oral story telling about the man Jesus, dared to name him Lord, and dared to tell of his conquest of all darkness and suffering and even death despite his much publicised execution by Roman overlords. They dared to tell of a powerlessness that conquers even the most brutal and manipulative powers. They dared to turn reason upside-down.

Luke’s telling of the Jesus-story was based on his two or three decades of life-transforming encounter with the risen Christ. That Christ had been made known to him by the persuasive presence of the Spirit in evangelism and worship and fellowship and scriptural exploration. At the heart of that experience was the belief that against all appearances God the Creator had turned existence upside-down in Jesus. No longer was the brutal Caesar Lord, but the crucified outsider criminal was Lord. No longer were the proud and together and slick and polished the mighty, but the broken and the hesitant and the Not Very Clever. No longer were the dwellers in crystal palaces powerful, but the dwellers in culverts and bus shelters. No longer were the clever creative aesthetes the conduits of divine goodness, but the bumbling stumblers were.

In this reversal Luke interpreted the whole of Jewish history as a history of expectation, a history of the hope that despite suffering and despair, despite Daesh and a myriad myriad shootings and road traumas and human catastrophes social and personal, despite all appearances, God’s “yes,” God’s promise first whispered to Abraham, would one day be fulfilled, and indeed was fulfilled in Jesus of the manger.

We know next to nothing about Luke, but he was not thick. He knew that Caesar still packed a mighty punch, that poverty was unromantic, that death either by natural causes or at the hands of a brutal state was fiercely unattractive for both the dying and for those who love them. But Luke’s years of worship and fellowship, practising the presence of God by building on his first life-changing encounter with Jesus, his years of breaking open the Hebrew scriptures and finding his Saviour writ large there, these had persuaded him over and again that it was not the silliness of belief in the resurrected Christ but the silliness of the failure to see beyond suffering and death that represented truncation of the human heart and soul. And so he either put into Mary’s mouth, or more likely recorded a poetic vision that had originated with Mary the mother of Jesus, the mystical Mother of God, the words through which the Christ-life must be lived: “my soul doth magnify the Lord … despite everything logical.”

This means though that as Christians we are not called to see the rational and coherent and strategic and sequential, but to see the vast and incomprehensible upside-down blessing of God, the inextinguishable blaze of Christ-light in which human experience of sensibleness and coherence and strategically planned-for and sequentially ordered existence is made inconsequential. He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts. We are called not to see things as they are to us, but as they are to the eternal perspective of God. This is impossible, but aided by the Spirit of the Resurrection we can withstand God-given glances of the eternities.

Centuries ago the great saint John Chrysostom wrote to Christians who were experiencing persecution and death in a brutal reprisal initiated by the Emperor Theodosius. Theodosius had begun by stripping away the privileges of the city Antioch in which those Christians lived, removing therefore the comfortable protections they had relied on. History is slowly repeating itself.

For social chit chat today is increasingly toxic in its assessment of Christianity and its practitioners. Groundswells of murmuring and economic realities coalesce to indicate that one day even western or global north Christians will not enjoy the cosy infrastructural privilege that has been our Linus blanket for centuries. As this happens we might learn from Chrysostom’s sage warning: the honour of a city, Chrysostom warned, is not the favour of the emperor, or the large and beautiful buildings, but the piety of those who worship the God of Jesus Christ.

The beauty and security, the Linus blanket of a church or a cathedral or a diocesan infrastructure will crumble, but it is the prayers of the people, the journeying of the people in the way in which and to which we are baptised: these are the church and the cathedral and the diocese and the collected authenticity of the City of God.

To that we must witness by our mad-crazy actions. Are we a people who welcome and embrace the odd and dysfunctional or the just plain different? I speak not only of our big picture response to the world’s growing migration of refugees, but the far more difficult small picture response of our attitude to a noisy child or an unshowered street person or a person with prison tats in the pew next to us. Do we embrace or do we exclude? I know my first reaction, and I suspect I am not alone in needing to confess my reliance on comfort zones that do not represent the topsy-turvy Magnificat values of Jesus the Christ. Do we embrace and include those who are not from our socio-economic, chronological, ethnic or cultural milieu, or do we subtly (not least by our expectations of high literacy) exclude the lowly and the other, as we sing or read our Magnificat?

Advent is a time of preparation. Sometimes the temptation is even to make preparation distant and abstract, if aesthetically pleasing. Remembering the sage words of R.A.K. Mason’s “On the Swag” at least as much as those of Jesus the already-come and still-coming Christ, or indeed of Mary his mother, we need to ask once more whether our hearts are really prepared to encounter Jesus, to “bring him in, ” to “let the wine be spiced  in the old cove’s night-cap.” Can we pause to meet him in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world he simultaneously inhabits and promises, or are we prisoners of our own paradigms of comfort and propriety, orderliness and niceness?

 

May God help us to be ready for the coming, upside-down Christ of the Magnificat.  

 

The peace of the coming Christ be always with you.

 

---

[1] See R.A.K. Mason, “On the Swag”.

Comes forth a prickly bugger

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ADVENT SUNDAY
(November 29^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Jeremiah 33:14-16

Psalm 25
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

 

Five hundred and eighty seven years before Christ the safe world of believers’ cosy relationship with God was shattered. Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt were at each other’s throats. Power surges and vacuums inter-twined. Villages and cities were slaughtered, populations upended, migrations and genocidal obliterations reverberated across once-fertile lands, and rivers ran with blood. Josiah had attempted to reform Israel’s faith and the complacent and self-satisfied people wanted little to do with his God. The Egyptians slaughtered Josiah, the Babylonians slaughtered the Egyptians, the Egyptians re-slaughtered the Babylonians and so it went on. Somehow, through it all, a tiny Middle Eastern tribe of not always nice, more-or-less monotheistic former nomads found and lost, briefly observed and lost again a bunch of laws and rituals that made them distinctive, though they by and large indifferently ignored the demands of their inconvenient justice-seeking, hope-promising God.

Into all this stepped a prickly bugger named Jeremiah, who began to warn his complacent compatriots that their self-satisfied pride was soon to come to an end.  Like many before me I am tempted to add that my use of the word “bugger” in a sermon will have caused some more offence that the fact that the people of God had become self-satisfied and complacent, or that the Middle East then as now was descending into chaotic slaughter.

That aside perhaps, Jeremiah dared to challenge the self-satisfaction of his people, was put on trial for his troubles, was rescued from execution, but died in obscurity and crippling sorrow, depicted in the Book of Lamentations. His people did not listen, his nation was destroyed, his faith-narrative almost – but in the end only almost – obliterated from the earth. Amidst all this he had continued to serve the God he trusted, and even, as his people’s complacent lives were shattered, had dared to suggest that God would one day bring hope to them again: in those days, he said, Judah will be saved. He died without seeing it.

It was as if Jeremiah spoke of God acting as a magnet, drawing God’s people into a future. It was an impossible, unseeable future, and whether Jeremiah promised good or ill he was hated for it. The Hebrews’ God was unsexy, demanding and frankly embarrassing, and compromise with marauding Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians made far more sense that the awkward demands of this risible and inconvenient deity. God had been a kind of useful entity in the Hebrews’ brief nationalistic glory days, providing entertaining and uplifting rites and a little bit of Zionist fervour, but when the going gets tough the self-satisfied get pliable, get compromisable, get unidentifiable.

If we dare to sing “teach me your paths, O God” we may discover that we are called out of the respectable into the ridiculous, called out of comfort into chaos, called out of complacency into naked exposure: only then after learning at last with Jeremiah and Paul and the great prophets of God that we have to fling ourselves broken and hopeless into the twilight realm of God’s promises, only then may we find the living warmth and embrace of the God who is always there, beckoning, waiting, weeping.

Global warming, clashing civilisations, travel warnings, the rise of apparently vicious and puerile Presidential candidates in the world’s most powerful nation:  we might well wonder what beasts are slowly slouching towards the Bethlehem of our cosy western comfort zones. Yet as Egypt, Assyria and Babylon treated Palestine as a battle ground it is hardly likely that things were a bunch of fluffy ducks for the Hebrews. Individual lives and the life of a corporate civilisation were under threat in 587 b.c.e. no less than in almost any decade since on almost any tectonic plate of God’s earth. Jeremiah though dared to speak of a living, pulsing God and God’s future despite the ever-present threat of personal or cultural obliteration and no-future, un-future. Today we might be more aware of earth’s every atrocity and idiocy, as far right terrorists hold shoot outs in Colorado abortion clinics, global temperatures rise, and the great empires of the post-modern era carve up Syrian airspace as they attempt to eradicate their own Frankenstein’s monsters, but for human beings the threat is the same: obliteration. And in the face of the unchanging universal threat Jeremiah dared to speak of a God who promises, who weeps, who cares even for a sparrow that falls (though those words were from a later prophet who saw the signs and dared to believe). Jeremiah asks us to read the signs of the time with a bible in one hand and remote control in the other.

But the bible we hold in our hands (and I hope we do), while it speaks of portents and portents of portents is not a time table. It does not speak of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. It is in itself a promise: “lo I am with you always, even to the ends of the ages.” It is the promise that humanity’s “no”, the decimation of God’s earth and species, the death of dodos and Hector’s dolphins and Baishan fir trees, this is not the final word. It is the promise that what Louis-Ferdinand Céline refers to as cancer cells creeping up our bowels or the sickening sound of sliding tyres and crunching metal is not the final word. It is the promise built on the experience of countless generations of imperfect human beings, the experience that humanity’s fragility is not the final word, that God’s “yes” is.

It is the final word that strangely dwells in humanity’s DNA. In our uncanny status as homo religiosis we long for meaning beyond life in a way that other animals do not, long with a longing that is often repressed, cauterized, trivialised, killed, sometimes with good reason. Yet in all this longing there is a hint of the truth of the imago dei, the image of God that is unique to the upright, laughing ape that we are. As homo religiosis cries out in a myriad ways “to you Lord I lift up my voice,” finding rites around life and love and death, we reveal our possession of this image of god, this signature of the God who is not just Alpha or just Omega but is Alpha and Omega; the signature of the Creator who beckons us from billions of years of yesterdays since we left the primeval swamp and on to an eternity of love in the presence of the God of Jesus Christ, in the presence of those we have loved and lost and will find again, in the many mansions of the eternal City.

In Advent we join the dance of those who have dared to believe.  It’s not a sexy journey. It’s not a journey of the elite or the sophisticated or the good enough, of the clever or the holier or cleaner or smarter than thou. It is the journey of those who know each day that we are not good enough, that we are a sin-doing people, that we are an arrogant and unholy people, that we are a people and I a person who desperately needs the healing, restoring love-touch of Jesus the Christ as we cry with the psalmist “pardon my guilt.” It is a journey in the end though that, if we dare to take it, will take us beyond the death throes of any and every being and any and every civilisation into the forever dance of God and those we love in God.

The peace of the beckoning Christ be always with you.

 

Prayer drunk yet?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ORDINARY SUNDAY 33
(November 15^th) 2015

 

Readings:

1 Samuel 1:4-20

(for the psalm): Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

 

In my days as a Pentecostal worshipper I was often thrown into paroxysms of panic by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible. These are texts which in their first century setting were designed to assure the faithful not only that God knew the circumstances and trials that believers were undergoing, but also would bring surety and comfort in what were referred to by Jesus as “times of trial.” Mishandled, though, these texts brought to this believer and many of his confreres and consouers only terror. As newscasts brought evidence of war after war this new believer struggled to find comfort in the scriptures.

Images of highway pile-ups and planes crashing (long before 9/11), of graves opening and believers’ bodies rising to the heavens brought little comfort. There were wars and rumours of wars: Iraq, Lebanon, Salvador and, as it happens, Syria were just some of the conflicts thrust on my awareness, while Ronald Reagan escalated Star Wars and stared at Leonid Brezhnev down the barrels of his arsenal. They were heady times, though perhaps less heady than when Kennedy and Khrushchev stared each other down nearly two decades earlier, before my conscious time. Pentecostal doctrine, as I’ve mentioned before, was obsessed with the rise of a Polish Pope and an ethnically Jewish Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Though there were no more earthquakes in 1979 than any other given year, each one that did occur had millennialists scanning the clouds for the return of Jesus. Those with whom I was rubbing shoulders expected the Second Coming any day and planned accordingly.

It was as it happens ever thus. Wars and rumours of wars have ever been and ever will be, for as long as humans have breath. Earthquakes have ever been and ever will be for as long as there is an earth to quake. It can of course be acknowledged that improving media were generating heightened awareness of a global village by the late 1970s: images of the Iran/Iraq War were beamed to our living rooms daily from 1980 onwards. It is though also worth recalling, as I have mentioned before, that we were aware of one significant real change: since July 16, 1945 humanity had possessed the resources, for the first time ever, to obliterate itself and cast Mother Earth into nuclear winter. We still have that ability, and now always will.

The wars and rumours or wars, earthquakes and famines were ever thus and ever will be thus. But apocalyptic Christians have forever distorted biblical teachings, effectively fleeing to deserts to await the coming of Christ, as Montanus and his prophets supposedly did (but probably didn’t!) in Anatolia in the third century and as Jim Jones and David Koresh did in their toxic, lethal mixed-up confusions, and others will again.

Jesus was not suggesting that we retreat into silliness so that Roman armies need to rescue us from our isolated waiting spots. He was suggesting that we are aware of the world around us, but more important even than reading the bible with a newspaper in our hands (as Karl Barth allegedly recommended), is reading the bible with a transforming knowledge that it tells of a God who will journey with us into the darkest recesses of human experience.

This was no new doctrine, but a Hebrew doctrine in which the incarnate Jesus was deeply immersed. Hannah, one of the great Hebrew women of faith, was so immensely absorbed in the experience of God-with-her that, cast out as she was about to be on the scrapheap of womankind, she exhibited deep, deep faith in God’s presence and ability to hear and to answer prayer. Few of us will achieve such piety, stemming from a life of immersion in faith. She pours out her heart to God, first in silent petition, and subsequently in praise. In either context her piety was so intense that she might be accused of drunkenness.

As it happens our liturgies of faith take the same journey, from repentance to cleansing to pleading petition to the drunken ecstasy of thanksgiving, though I suspect few would look suspiciously at our rites and wonder if we were drunk! Nevertheless the journey is there in our worship, and as we practice rites with a lifetime of open hearts we may yet experience the uncanny transformation into Christlikeness that the Protestants call sanctification and Orthodox traditions call divinization: transformation into the person we are called by God to be, “Changed from glory into glory, ’Till in Heav’n we take our place” (as Charles Wesley put it).

But as the great interpretations of Hebrew traditions by Christ-followers affirm, especially in the book we call Hebrews, we are aided on that transforming journey by the Christ of Nazareth. He is known to us in his Spirit who invades us, dwells with us, purges us, but always travels with us, whether we name and practice this experience or not. Jesus has done the hard yards, even to the moment of crying out “there is … there can be no God,” yet even as he cried out remaining, as G.K Chesterton observed, God.

It was this that the language of apocalyptic was seeking to express: there will be bombings in Paris and earthquakes in California or Chile or Aotearoa, there will be god-awful suffering in Syria and Christmas and Manus Islands and at the razor wire barricades of Europe and Nauru, in the cells of our bodies and the road- and life-journeys of those we love, and in the slow and sometimes frightening gasps of the earth we are destroying. We need not go out into the desert to encounter the God who comes, but into our struggled and sometimes seemingly empty words of prayer, pouring out our hearts as Hannah did, not always seeing or experiencing answers, yet practising the presence of God, the God who comes, who comes even to us.

Sometimes (though of course being Anglican we might wait until no one is looking!) we might even learn to dance our ecstasy, or even dance or maybe cry our pain, or perhaps just allow our thoughts to dance or weep: to dance or weep in the sometimes frenetic, sometimes still presence of the God who dances and weeps too. Sometimes, as we learn to do that, we may even become so infectious in faith and hope and love, especially love, that others will see Christ too, and dance (wherever they may be, as Sydney Carter put it).

 

The peace of the dancing Christ be always with you.

Which Jesus?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

ORDINARY SUNDAY 32

(November 8^th) 2015

 

 

Readings:

 

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17

Psalm 127

Hebrews 9:24-28

Mark 12:38-44

 

Today we enter into that question Jesus put to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Who is this that gazes across the Temple of Jerusalem and observes what are in economic terms the last gasps of a dying woman? Who is this who does nothing to alleviate her suffering but goes on to predict the not yet apparent destruction of corrupt religion, religion for which she gave her last economic breath? Who is this man Jesus? Why take notice of him at all, much less turn him into our Invisible Friend, or speak of him on Remembrance Day?

There are many ways to address this christological question, as many as there are bottoms on the clouds of eternity. Circumstances change, eras change: the breathing, thinking space of every observer of Jesus differs according to their life story. There are though some broad-picture categories that have been major keys to interpreting Jesus. Is he a role model to follow? The rather unpleasant, toxic nineteenth century atheist James Thompson offered a caustic (and sexist) critique of the presentation of Jesus as mere role model:

This poor sexless Jew, with a noble feminine heart, and a magnificent though uncultivated and crazy brain, did no work to earn his bread; evaded all social and political responsibilities, took no wife and contemned his own family; lived a vagabond, fed and housed by charity … and died with the lamentable cry of womanish desperation, perhaps the most significant confession in history of a life of supreme self-illusion laid bare to itself at the point of death. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The extent to which Thompson got things wrong is common but excruciating, not least the significance of that powerful cry of dereliction from the Cross, but we might leave that for a moment. I suggest that there are moments in the legends surrounding Krishna or Gautama Buddha that I find more uplifting than some of the moments in the life of Jesus.

As it happens I would say the same of Jesus as a teacher. There are of course wonderful moments. For those of us who know the story the question “who is my neighbour” is powerfully answered in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and the image of the shepherd leaving 99 sheep to find the hundredth, while perhaps not good agricultural policy in the modern world, was in first century Palestine a deeply illuminating image of God’s determined compassion. But there are moments in the teachings of, say, Confucius or Karl Marx that I find every bit as illuminating as the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many interpretations find in Jesus the social and religious revolutionary, the Che Guevara of first century Palestine. Certainly Judas wanted him to be that, and much liberation theology has emphasized that many of Jesus’ teachings, not least this story of the widow’s mite (when it is given its proper ending about the destruction of the Temple) do point to revolutionary ideals. But there was no revolution, and while some remarkable followers of Jesus (Oscar Romero and Desmond Tutu come to mind) have contributed to powerful reform, most revolutions have merely replaced one form of tyranny with another, and The Emperor Louis is merely replaced by The President Robespierre, or apartheid’s oppression replaced with Zuma’s corruption, and the peasants still starve.

As the early Christians gathered and told stories they were most deeply moved by another aspect of the life and teachings and death of Jesus. They were most deeply moved by their overwhelming sense of the resurrection of Jesus and their overwhelming sense of the presence of Jesus as they gathered. The suggestion that they were just silly and misguided naïfs is unconvincing: some were prepared to die in defence of their right to proclaim the revolutionary resurrection of Jesus, and many then and now did so.

There was a “been there done that” dimension to the Jesus they encountered in their faith journey. No matter what they underwent, they were strengthened by the experience of the Risen Lord journeying with them, journeying even into death and resurrection with them. It is this that the author of Hebrews is emphasizing as she depicts the journey of High Priest Christ through the brutality of human suffering and death and on to what she calls “heaven itself.”

Her congregation had grown bored, nonchalant, laissez faire about the Jesus thing. The Hebrews preacher was prepared to put one more bomb under the unidentified Hebrews’ collective backside, and the fact that we read her sermon still, 2000 years later, suggests that at least some got the message.

But does her message of a “been there, done that High Priest” have anything to say today? Today, as Israeli forces shoot dead a 72-year-old Palestinian woman; today as refugees continue to struggle and die in one of humanity’s greatest ever mass-migrations, the most significant since the two Great Wars we also acknowledge this day; today as we hear of the fightback of bacteria in hospital wards; today when "Innocent until Proven Muslim" is becoming an increasingly vitriolic attitude and we are threatening to lose our ability to feel compassion; today when in the face of ecological crisis we must wonder what world we are bequeathing our mokopuna?  

But also, as we observe the Remembrance that we must not forget, does her message of a “been there, done that High Priest” have anything to say, as we recall when troops and civilians died in their millions, 38 million dead or injured in World War One, 60 million dead and countless injured in World War Two? Did the meaning of Jesus die as war broke out? Does the meaning of Jesus die each time calamity breaks out, globally or personally?

Jesus does once and for all die to meaning if all we have is nice teacher Jesus, good example Jesus, or social revolutionary Jesus. But this is not who the early Christians discovered as they gathered in secret to worship, nor who the chaplains conveyed as they hunkered down in the trenches and hospitals and killing fields of not just two World Wars but of almost every war for two millennia.

In the lead up to World War One the churches had recreated Jesus in their own image: nationalistic Jesus, nice Jesus, Jesus slavishly obedient to public demand. But that Jesus died without resurrection in the wars, and slowly we are learning to rediscover the life- and death-transforming Jesus, the been there done that Jesus who beckons to the suffering and dying of all armies, all civilians, all conscientious objectors, all who face incurable disease and even those who face the incurable diseases we have inflicted on mother Earth. Because what the author of Hebrews had discovered was “been there, done that” Jesus, the Jesus of the agonised Cross, the Jesus who took the experience of God from trenches to mountain top, the Jesus who offered resurrection wherever people reached out to receive him.

Shortly we will reach out to receive that Jesus in communion. The earliest Christians did so too; they did so because they knew the Great High Priest who journeys into every human hell hole to bring peace, the Great High Priest who inexplicably invites us through the curtain of death to the far country, “whose ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.” They did so because Jesus transforms death into eternal life.  

Shortly we will reach out to receive that Jesus in communion.

 

The Lord be with you